


That Look You Give Me

by embagel



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Adora (She-Ra) Needs a Hug, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Fluff, Holding Hands, Kissing, POV Catra (She-Ra), POV First Person, Post-Canon, soft touches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:34:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28393188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/embagel/pseuds/embagel
Summary: Adora wakes up from a nightmare. Catra comforts her. First person from Catra's POV.
Relationships: Adora/Catra (She-Ra)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 67





	That Look You Give Me

“C…Catra?” I hear Adora’s voice, high, weak, and shaky. “Melog?” A sniffle.  
  
I jump off the balcony handrail and run into our room. She sits in our bed, hugging her knees, shaking. My stomach crunches up. I hate it when she has these nightmares. They happen all the time, and I hate it. She doesn’t deserve this. “Babe, I’m here. I’m here.”  
  
She looks up at me, her cheeks wet, pain written across her face. My heart drops through the floor. She starts crying openly, and I crawl into bed with her and wrap myself around her. I pet her hair and she cries silently on my chest. I hate this. I know exactly how much she’s hurting and it’s not fair. We lie like this for a while, and eventually, she calms down enough to speak.  
  
“He took you again,” she mumbles without looking up. This is nothing new; a lot of her dreams involve Horde Prime killing me in front of her in new and creative ways. I get angry—my cheeks burn and I hear my heart pounding in my ears. I know she killed him with the power of love or whatever, but I wish I had him here right now. Just him and me, no chips, no clones. I wish, I fucking wish I could fucking kill him for every time Adora woke up hurting because of him.  
  
“Do you you wanna talk about it?” I ask. I don’t like listening to the details of my deaths, but sometimes she wants to talk about it. It sometimes helps. Plus I owe it to her to listen, since she always listens to me when I want to talk.  
  
“It was just… the fall, again,” she answers. I close my eyes and she squeezes me really tight for a few seconds. The fucking fall. She has that dream a lot. The details change sometimes, but the gist is that she couldn’t get to me in time, or I was too far gone and even She-Ra’s healing powers weren’t enough to save me.  
  
The big thing is, though, she has to watch me die. For the third time this week. I can feel my eyes burning and a tear falls. It hurts so much to see her in this much pain. I probably wouldn’t cry tonight, though, if I weren’t so fucking mad. Partly I’m mad because Prime hurt my girlfriend so badly, and partly I’m mad because I can’t fucking destroy him.  
  
“And then I woke up and you weren’t here,” Adora continues, “and I just started crying.”  
  
I sigh. “I’m really sorry, babe,” I say as gently as I can. “I was having trouble sleeping and I wanted to look at the stars.”  
  
Adora coughs out a little laugh. “My stargazer,” she says. The one side of my mouth curls up a little bit. I can’t hear my heart pounding anymore. Perfuma says forcing myself to be calm doesn’t work, but I do it for Adora. She needs me to keep it together, so I do. It helps.  
  
“Yeah, babe. Your stargazer.” The name makes me feel warm. She gave it to me one night when we were on the roof of one of the towers, looking up at the sky. It’s special because it’s just for us. Well, Melog hears it too. But that’s it. They’re not spreading it around.  
  
I also really like it whenever she calls me hers. It gives me a feeling all the princesses call “butterflies in your stomach” every time. I’m hers and she’s mine.  
  
Adora speaks again, bringing me back to the moment. “I’m sorry I freaked out.”  
  
“Shush. Adora, this is not your fault.”  
  
“I know, I just…” She takes a deep breath. “It makes me feel so weak.”  
  
I wish she’d stop saying that. She’s so far from weak. She jumped into darkness to save me. And she did, she saved me. She saved all of us. But I pause, and I take a breath, because that’s what Perfuma told me to do. “Adora… you’re not weak.” I try empathizing, thinking about how I’ve felt weak even though Adora always says I’m the strongest person she knows. How it must make her feel when I say the same thing. “I know it feels like it,” I mumble. “I get that way too. But you always tell me I’m strong.”  
  
She kisses my collarbone. “You are, babe,” she says, “but I’m… a mess.”  
  
I chuckle. “You’ve been a mess our whole lives, Adora. But you’ve been strong our whole lives, too.”  
  
She looks up at me and for the first time, she smiles. It’s a tiny smile, but that’s okay. “You, too,” she says.  
  
I smile back. These days I can’t seem to stop myself when she smiles at me. I feel all warm and… I don’t know… it’s nice, though. Adora crawls up to me and her face hovers above mine, a whisper away. My breath catches and my eyes flutter closed. I feel her hand on my cheek and I lean into it. Her thumb feels nice.  
  
“I love you so much,” she breathes.  
  
“I love you, too,” I whisper back. “I love you… more than anything.” I look up into her eyes, her eyes that are as blue and deep and vast as the sky over Bright Moon, and they’re sparkling. I can’t tell if it’s the light from the Moonstone, or her tears, or how much she loves me, or how much I love her, but I feel like I’m stargazing again.  
  
“Catra…” She gives me that look, the one she seems to save just for me. “You’re so…” She looks at me the way she looks at the stars, the way Entrapta looks at new technology, the way Scorpia looks at Perfuma. Like she’s looking at her whole world. I begin to feel warm.  
  
“I’m soooo…” I say, hoping she’ll finish the thought. She doesn’t. Instead, she shakes her head, smiles again, and kisses me. Maybe that was the thought, I don’t know. I’m satisfied, though.  
  
Adora is so beautiful. I spent a long time trying very hard not to think that, because I thought she didn’t feel the same way about me. But I don’t resist it anymore, and that feels good. Now I get to just look at her, whenever I want. I try not to let anyone else see; except Glimmer, anyway. She doesn’t tease me about it anymore—I think Adora told her that bothered me, but I can’t be sure. But I look at Adora, and when she notices, she smiles at me with that radiant smile of hers, and I feel like I’m looking at my whole world.  
  
It’s nice to see… it’s nice to see her looking at me like that, now. And I realize, slowly, that she’s been giving me this exact same look for… years. Since we were kids. It hits me, and my breath leaves my body, and I feel my face scrunch up.  
  
I look away from her, toward the window. Since we were kids. And all that time…  
  
I feel her finger softly on my cheek. “Hey,” she says, “you okay?”  
  
“How long have you loved me, Adora?”  
  
“Well,” she says, sitting up next to me and resting her head on my shoulder, “it’s kind of hard to say. I mean, in one sense, that’s easy—I’ve loved you for as long as I can remember. But in the sense I think you mean… I really don’t know. I’m sure… years, but I don’t think I realized it until we were down in the heart, when I had my vision of the future. Why do you ask?”  
  
I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I just realized, that look you give me… when you look at me like I’m—” I feel embarrassed by what I’m saying— “like I—I’m the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. Like I’m important, a—and… precious, I guess. And… what I realized is that… you’ve been giving me that look for years.”  
  
For a minute, she doesn’t say anything, and I start to feel antsy. I try not to tap my feet, or my fingers, or bat my tail against the bed. Adora finds my hand and laces her fingers between mine, and I feel her tracing the lines of my hand with her fingertips. “I’m really sorry,” she says, finally. “I… just don’t know when I fell in love with you. I don’t even know how it happened… maybe it was fast, or maybe it took years, or maybe… maybe my love for you just changed form or something.”  
  
Yeah… I don’t know when it happened for me either. I guess it was too much to ask her that. I just feel so… exactly the same as I felt when I realized, looking back, that Adora hadn’t left me, that she’d asked me every time she saw me, for ages, to leave the Horde and come with her. I feel like we could have avoided so much pain and had so much more time together.  
  
I tell her all this, and she lifts my hand to her lips and kisses it softly. When she does, I feel a little of the tension in my body melt away. It really does feel a bit like when we were kids, when I used to sleep with her because being close to her calmed me down. I let my head rest on hers and I close my eyes. Her fingertips tingle pleasantly on the back of my hand.  
  
We sit like that for a little while, and she shifts. “It’s almost four,” she says softly. “Do you wanna try sleeping again?”  
  
“Yeah, I do. I promise I’ll be here when you wake up this time.”  
  
“I don’t think I’ll have any more nightmares tonight.”  
  
“I hope not. But just in case, I’ll be here.”  
  
Adora… fuck, she’s so beautiful… smiles at me, and we lie down, snuggling close together. I feel her press a soft kiss on my lips, and I can’t help smiling again. My chest feels tingly. It’s not like butterflies in your stomach, it’s calmer, more comfortable. I like that after all this time, I still get it every time we kiss.  
  
I love this woman so much. I always have.  
  
“Sleep well,” I whisper.  
  
“You too,” she mumbles. “I love you.”  
  
“I love you, too, Adora.”  
  
I always will.


End file.
